Billionaire Greek Ship Owners Surface While Home Economy Sinks

More than a thousand delegates from the shipping industry gathered last month at the Hilton Athens for the Greek Shipping Forum, a day of speeches and panel discussions on private equity, ship recycling and financing.

The packed reception hall was a testament to how the nation’s ship owners still dominate the industry decades after Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos ruled the waves. The Hellenic fleet is the world’s most valuable at $106 billion, according to VesselsValue.com, accounting for 19 percent of the world’s tankers.

Greece’s seafaring mastery is a remarkable feat for the world’s 42nd-largest economy, where economic and political turmoil has left a quarter of the population unemployed.

“This is a business that’s part of their soul,” Matt McCleery, author of “The Shipping Man” and president of Stamford, Connecticut-based ship finance consultancy Marine Money International, said in a phone interview. “It’s so important to their culture, to their identity, and to their history.”

It’s also made billionaires of the country’s four largest ship owners by tonnage: John Angelicoussis, George Prokopiou, Peter Livanos and George Economou. The quartet control a combined fortune of $7.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. None of them appear individually on an international wealth ranking.
Fleet Valuations

The richest is Angelicoussis, whose companies own 96 active vessels with a capacity of more than 18 million deadweight tons, the industry’s standard measurement for how much ships carry, according to data for December compiled by maritime newspaper Shipping Finance. His family’s stake in the fleet is valued at $2.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“He’s one of the great men of our industry,” Harry Fafalios, chairman of the Greek Shipping Co-Operation Committee, said in an interview in London.

The 66-year-old’s fortune is calculated based on data provided by London-based VesselsValue.com, an online ship valuation database. It includes his active fleet and vessels under construction and is based on the ships’ size, age and earnings, and excludes charters.
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The value of the vessels are discounted by 60 percent to approximate the typical level of financing Greek ship owners can obtain today, according to Anthony Zolotas, chief executive officer of ship financing adviser Eurofin SA.

Angelicoussis declined to comment on his net worth.

Prokopiou has a fortune valued at $2 billion, according to the Bloomberg ranking. Livanos controls at least $1.7 billion and Economou has a net worth of $1.5 billion. Their fortunes are comprised of stakes in their publicly traded shipping businesses and closely held vessels.

The three billionaires declined to comment on their net worth, according to spokesmen.
Hellenic Fleet

Greeks have long dominated the shipping business. The nation’s fleet, numbering 3,669 vessels in 2013, is the largest in the world, according to the annual report of the Union of Greek Shipowners, making up more than 7 percent of the Greek economy and providing 192,000 jobs in 2013.

Greece’s shipping magnates control 23 percent of the world bulk carrier fleet, according to the report, even as their home country accounts for less than 0.4 percent of the world economy.

Their success in one of the most global industries stands in contrast to their country’s domestic troubles, where 36 percent of the population was at risk of poverty or exclusion from social benefits at the end of 2013, according to Eurostat, the statistics agency of the European Commission.

“There is a humanitarian crisis,” said Spyros Economides, a professor in international relations and European politics at the London School of Economics. “It’s not just the problems on the street, it’s much more endemic and deeper than that with people fearing they might get evicted from their homes, who can’t pay their electricity bills, who are having problems feeding their families.”
Perama Clinic

That’s evident at the Medecins du Monde clinic in Perama, Athens’ poorest suburb. It provides free medical help to locals without access to Greece’s health system and has seen its patient numbers double since it opened in 2010 amid the erosion of state health coverage.

As social pressures mount, the privileged tax status of the shipping industry has come under increasing scrutiny as successive Greek governments look to boost revenue. The industry pays no tax on international earnings brought into the country under rules incorporated in Greece’s constitution in 1967.
Constitutional Cover

“All these laws are to protect ship management companies that serve mostly international trade and commerce,” said Ilias Bissias, a lecturer in international shipping policy at Alba Graduate Business School in Athens. “This regime should not be changed as it is similar and in line with international tax laws that exist in most maritime centers in all parts of the world.”

Even with this constitutional cover, the Union of Greek Shipowners reached a voluntary agreement with the previous government in October to double the tax paid by the industry in the three years from 2014.

Whether that will be enough for the country’s new anti-austerity Syriza-led government isn’t clear. In a February letter to creditor institutions, Greece Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said the new regime will “ensure that all sections of society, and especially the well-off, contribute fairly to the financing of public policies,” as part of reforms that secured the continued availability of bailout funds for Europe’s most indebted country.
Formidable Reputation

“Shipping together with tourism are the two main sources of income for the country,” said Eurofin’s Zolotas. “The government would be ill-advised to make it less attractive for ship owners to remain in Greece because ship owners are providers of a lot of employment.”

With limited demand from their domestic market, Greek ship owners have long looked beyond home shores for business. While it’s helped shelter them from the worst of the Greek crisis, the industry is still fraught with challenges.

The Baltic Dry Index, a blended measure of rates for dry vessels, is down 51 percent this year to record lows. Meanwhile, low oil prices have caused the tanker market, another area that’s been a traditional Greek strength, to undergo a renaissance, though the market typically reverses within three to six months, according to Michail Kokkinis, founder of Piraeus-based ship broker Golden Destiny.

“Greek ship owners are gamblers,” Tony Foster, founder of London-based shipping asset manager Marine Capital. “The history of Greek shipping is that they take risks. The shipping market is volatile and highly cyclical. Greeks are willing to embrace that risk.”

Niarchos and Onassis, dubbed the Golden Greeks because of their wealth and celebrity, competed during the second half of the 20th century. They raced to build the world’s largest fleets and outdo each other with the size of their islands, yachts and weddings. Stavros’s son Philip inherited much of his art collection from his father’s estate.

Their influence is still visible today. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, endowed with a portion of the family’s estate following Stavros’s death in 1996, is responsible for the city’s largest construction project on the site of a former racecourse at the south end of Syngrou Avenue, which bisects the bottom of the city.

The $800 million undertaking, designed by architect Renzo Piano, will house the national library and opera company and feature a 42-acre park on the roof.

Adjacent to the park is the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center. Other donations from shipping dynasties pockmark the city, including the Eugenides Foundation’s planetarium and the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art.

Today’s top shipping tycoons are more inclined to keep a lower profile, particularly since the crisis hit.

“They’re very hard working and often humble people,” Marine Money’s McCleery said. “For the most part you find these guys who are dedicated and very family orientated. They work their tails off way beyond any monetary need.”
Source: Bloomberg